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The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the Academy’s popular website; American Poets, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events. Since its founding, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization.

Once in the West

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In his fourth collection of poems, Christian Wiman returns with the spiritual questions and learnéd wit characteristic of his earlier work (“We lived in the long intolerable called God”), but also with a newfound sense of intimacy, a closer voice. “More Like the Stars,” a single poem that comprises the book’s final section, finds the poet overwhelmed with love for his wife and daughters, facing the great difficulty of existing:

So much life in this poem so much salvageable and saving love

but it is I fear I swear I tear open what heart I have left

to keep it from being and beating and bearing down upon me

Wiman’s sophisticated command of internal rhyme echoes throughout these poems (“Silas, / say less // than silence”), which work to craft beauty in an uncertain world of “lordless // mornings” and “nightfall / neverness.” In “Music Maybe,” Wiman speaks of “[t]oo many elegies elevating sadness…one wants in the end just once to befriend / one’s own loneliness, // to make of the ache of inwardness— // something…” Here, out “of the ache of inwardness,” Wiman has made poems of existential angst and inquiry, love and destruction, prayer and song. “Once in the west I rose to witness / the cleverest devastation,” he writes in “Razing a Tower”—and it is precisely that “cleverest devastation” that Wiman crafts continuously in these heartrending poems.

This book review originally appeared in American Poets, Fall-Winter 2014.